I mean, yeah, if it doesn't work at all nobody will use it. But the big players are spending $1k/mo.+ on AI at this point. That's obviously out of reach for many.
I run a company of 4 people (including myself) and the "apple tax" (if by that you mean the price premium of macs and iphones vs PC and android) is a tiny fraction (borderline rounding error) of my budget.
Can't wait to try it. Made a small log app for my IBS which allows free text input and uses LLM to create JSON. If that could be done on device with a foundation model, it would be awesome. (and also completely bomb my income model)
What is the target to write for is the key aspect here. Not sure there is enough on the phone for developers to create new experiences. I fear all of them are going to try to automate everything on the phone for the user. Not sure what value that provides. May be I am overly skeptical , let’s see
Maybe I'm a "simple" user but I honestly can't think of anything I'd need automated on my phone that I haven't already automated myself with shortcuts. It's first and foremost a communication device, and I don't need AI automation to reply to my messages or emails for me, nor do I necessarily want purchases/ordering things automated either.
The personal context/search stuff is nice, but that's first party now so yeah, not much room for new experiences.
Reading the title I had a very different notion of what to expect. The article has something completely different. I was hoping this would be something for indie app devs.
Is this more scraping at the bottom of the barrel?
I get it. So many tech companies built their platforms around people submitting their work for sale. Now that things have cooled down they're desperate. This is exactly like what happened to the music and movie industries.
If they want to make money they must take bigger creative risks. AI is the exact opposite of that because it's trained on what's already been done.
You can get a certain portion of the population to pay $20/mo. but I think it's a very small population who's paying enough to actually cover frontier models in agentic workflows right now.
Either I've fallen in with a unique group of non-techy people willing to pay for an LLM subscription, or you just not giving enough credit to it. I guess time will tell
> Only about 3% of households were paying for AI in February, using the most recent numbers available from the Bank of America Institute, which researches consumer trends based on the bank's customer transactions.
But even among these people I doubt most spring for the $100 plans, let alone are willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per user the way corporate users do.
The funniest part of all of this is that, I as a techy dev type person, pay $0 for any LLM account. No, I'm not cheating with a paid by employer account. I just don't use it. So I guess my little group is breaking all of the stereotypes
Cheaper isn't as much of a problem as functional.
I think precisely the opposite: the marginal value of expensive models is quite small.
If I were to guess, cheaper in this context is being used by Apple to catch up to having an AI product with a real moat.
And, of course, Apple’s best moat is the App Store.
The other competitors have their coding and productivity software, all the stuff they built around their models.
Apple doesn’t really have much of that and I think this is essentially their only hope to gain some B2B revenue from AI.
I mean, yeah, if it doesn't work at all nobody will use it. But the big players are spending $1k/mo.+ on AI at this point. That's obviously out of reach for many.
the small developers eager to pay the Apple tax! I wonder what the theoretical size of this set is.
I run a company of 4 people (including myself) and the "apple tax" (if by that you mean the price premium of macs and iphones vs PC and android) is a tiny fraction (borderline rounding error) of my budget.
Apple tax generally refers to the 30% cut on app and in-app sales.
It's 15% for small developers
Can't wait to try it. Made a small log app for my IBS which allows free text input and uses LLM to create JSON. If that could be done on device with a foundation model, it would be awesome. (and also completely bomb my income model)
I haven’t been able to find a cost for larger developers. Is that published yet?
Their presentations talked about how it was based on the user’s quota, with higher quotas for iCloud+ subscribers.
What is the target to write for is the key aspect here. Not sure there is enough on the phone for developers to create new experiences. I fear all of them are going to try to automate everything on the phone for the user. Not sure what value that provides. May be I am overly skeptical , let’s see
Maybe I'm a "simple" user but I honestly can't think of anything I'd need automated on my phone that I haven't already automated myself with shortcuts. It's first and foremost a communication device, and I don't need AI automation to reply to my messages or emails for me, nor do I necessarily want purchases/ordering things automated either.
The personal context/search stuff is nice, but that's first party now so yeah, not much room for new experiences.
Wait, Apple is charging infrastructure fees? Since when, or are they just introducing new fees for those with over 2 million first-time downloads?
Reading the title I had a very different notion of what to expect. The article has something completely different. I was hoping this would be something for indie app devs.
uhh isn't it basically free access to API if your apps are less than 2 million downloads?
Before opening the link I thought they were reducing the cost per token.
This smells more like a get you hooked and then crank the costs.
Not that I'd be any less skeptical of the first option. We've already seen providers reduce quotas and raise prices.
Is this more scraping at the bottom of the barrel?
I get it. So many tech companies built their platforms around people submitting their work for sale. Now that things have cooled down they're desperate. This is exactly like what happened to the music and movie industries.
If they want to make money they must take bigger creative risks. AI is the exact opposite of that because it's trained on what's already been done.
but these "free" tokens take up an end user's daily free quota, after which a user needs to pay. ?
Small developers: "Your $99/year tithe has cost me thousands of dollars to provide basic support for your ecosystem."
Apple: "Did somebody say 'we want cheaper AI'?"
>Apple is hoping to draw in newer developers with lower AI infrastructure costs
Good luck, but define "cheaper" ? If you have to pay, no individual will pay, just corporations.
How do you come to this conclusion. I know several people that are absolutely not techy dev types, yet they pay for a subscription to chatgpt.
You can get a certain portion of the population to pay $20/mo. but I think it's a very small population who's paying enough to actually cover frontier models in agentic workflows right now.
Either I've fallen in with a unique group of non-techy people willing to pay for an LLM subscription, or you just not giving enough credit to it. I guess time will tell
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/04/nx-s1-5791661/chatgpt-gemini-...
> Only about 3% of households were paying for AI in February, using the most recent numbers available from the Bank of America Institute, which researches consumer trends based on the bank's customer transactions.
But even among these people I doubt most spring for the $100 plans, let alone are willing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars per user the way corporate users do.
The funniest part of all of this is that, I as a techy dev type person, pay $0 for any LLM account. No, I'm not cheating with a paid by employer account. I just don't use it. So I guess my little group is breaking all of the stereotypes
> If you have to pay, no individual will pay
Fee with ads is the right fit for most people. But I don't think that describes most Apple customers or developers.
I'm 5'7" thank you very much. That's above average in some regions.